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“Then you can just give me some directions,” Neal said. He was trying hard to get his voice under control, to get some ordinary sobriety into it. And to banish the smile, which kept slipping back in place no matter how often he swallowed it. “Just let’s go to the place and do our errand and head home.”
Half a slow block more, and Helen groaned.
“If I got to I guess I got to,” she said.
It was not very far that they had to go. They passed a subdivision, and Neal, speaking again to Ji
Ji
“Silver Creek Estates. On the sign.”
He must have read a sign that she had not seen.
“Turn,” said Helen.
“Left or right?”
“At the wrecker’s.”
They went past a wrecking yard, with the car bodies only partly hidden by a sagging tin fence. Then up a hill and past the gates to a gravel pit that was a great cavity in the center of the hill.
“That’s them. That’s their mailbox up ahead,” Helen called out with some importance, and when they got close enough she read out the name.
“Matt and June Bergson. That’s them.”
A couple of dogs came barking down the short drive. One was large and black and one small and tan-colored, puppylike. They bumbled around at the wheels and Neal sounded the horn. Then another dog-this one more sly and purposeful, with a slick coat and bluish spots-slid out of the long grass.
Helen called to them to shut up, to lay down, to piss off.
“You don’t need to bother about any of them but Pinto,” she said. “Them other two just cowards.”
They stopped in a wide, ill-defined space where some gravel had been laid down. On one side was a barn or implement shed, tin-covered, and over to one side of it, on the edge of a cornfield, an abandoned farmhouse from which most of the bricks had been removed, showing dark wooden walls. The house inhabited nowadays was a trailer, nicely fixed up with a deck and an awning, and a flower garden behind what looked like a toy fence. The trailer and its garden looked proper and tidy, while the rest of the property was littered with things that might have a purpose or might just be left around to rust or rot.
Helen had jumped out and was cuffing the dogs. But they kept on ru
Ji
“They just got to show off,” said Helen.
Neal had got out too and was negotiating with the dogs in a resolute way. The man from the shed came towards them. He wore a purple T-shirt that was wet with sweat, clinging to his chest and stomach. He was fat enough to have breasts and you could see his navel pushing out like a pregnant woman’s. It rode on his belly like a giant pincushion.
Neal went to meet him with his hand out. The man slapped his own hand on his work pants, laughed and shook Neal’s. Ji
“Lois went and forgot she was supposed to bring my shoes,” Helen called to her. “I phoned her up and everything, but she went and forgot anyway, so Mr. Lockyer brought me out to get them.”
The woman was fat too, though not as fat as her husband. She wore a pink muumuu with Aztec suns on it and her hair was streaked with gold. She moved across the gravel with a composed and hospitable air. Neal turned and introduced himself, then brought her to the van and introduced Ji
“Glad to meet you,” the woman said. “You’re the lady that isn’t very well?”
“I’m okay,” said Ji
“Well, now you’re here you better come inside. Come in out of this heat.”
“Oh, we just dropped by,” said Neal.
The man had come closer. “We got the air-conditioning in there,” he said. He was inspecting the van and his expression was genial but disparaging.
“We just came to pick up the shoes,” Ji
“You got to do more than that now you’re here,” said the woman-June-laughing as if the idea of their not coming in was a scandalous joke. “You come in and rest yourself.”
“We wouldn’t like to disturb your supper,” Neal said.
“We had it already,” said Matt. “We eat early.”
“But all kinds of chili left,” said June. “You have to come in and help clean up that chili.”
Ji
“Then you better drink something instead,” June said. “We got ginger ale, Coke. We got peach schnapps.”
“Beer,” Matt said to Neal. “You like a Blue?”
Ji
“I can’t do it,” she said. “Just tell them I can’t.”
“You know you’ll hurt their feelings,” he whispered. “They’re trying to be nice.”
“But I can’t. Maybe you could go.”
He bent closer. “You know what it looks like if you don’t. It looks like you think you’re too good for them.”
“You go.”
“You’d be okay once you got inside. The air-conditioning really would do you good.”
Ji
Neal straightened up.
“Ji
June said, “But she’s welcome to rest in the house-”
“I wouldn’t mind a Blue, actually,” Neal said. He turned back to Ji
“I’ll be fine,” said Ji
He put one hand on Helen’s shoulder and one on June’s shoulder, walking them companionably towards the trailer. Matt smiled at Ji
This time when he called the dogs to come after him Ji
Goober. Sally. Pinto.
The van was parked under a row of willow trees. These trees were big and old, but their leaves were thin and gave a wavering shade. But to be alone was a great relief.
Earlier today, driving along the highway from the town where they lived, they had stopped at a roadside stand and bought some early apples. Ji
It was all right. The apple was firm and tart, but not too tart, and if she took small bites and chewed seriously she could manage it.
She’d seen Neal like this-or something like this-a few times before. It would be over some boy at the school. A mention of the name in an offhand, even belittling way. A mushy look, an apologetic yet somehow defiant bit of giggling.
But that was never anybody she had to have around the house, and it could never come to anything. The boy’s time would be up, he’d go away.
So would this time be up. It shouldn’t matter.
She had to wonder if it would have mattered less yesterday than it did today.
She got out of the van, leaving the door open so that she could hang on to the inside handle. Anything on the outside was too hot to hang on to for any length of time. She had to see if she was steady. Then she walked a little in the shade. Some of the willow leaves were already going yellow. Some were lying on the ground. She looked out from the shade at all the things there were around the yard.
A dented delivery truck with both headlights gone and the name on the side painted out. A baby’s stroller that the dogs had chewed the seat out of, a load of firewood dumped but not stacked, a pile of huge tires, a great number of plastic jugs and some oil cans and pieces of old lumber and a couple of orange plastic tarpaulins crumpled up by the wall of the shed. In the shed itself there was a heavy GM truck and a small beat-up Mazda truck and a garden tractor, as well as implements whole or broken and loose wheels, handles, rods that would be useful or not useful depending on the uses you could imagine. What a lot of things people could find themselves in charge of. As she had been in charge of all those photographs, official letters, minutes of meetings, newspaper clippings, a thousand categories that she had devised and was putting on disk when she had to go into chemo and everything got taken away. It might end up being thrown out. As all this might, if Matt died.